front cover of Bark Beetles in North American Conifers
Bark Beetles in North American Conifers
A System for the Study of Evolutionary Biology
Edited by Jeffry B. Mitton and Kareen B. Sturgeon
University of Texas Press, 1982

Because they prey upon a wide variety of conifers, bark beetles have a major impact upon western forests. In most of the western states, for example, we have witnessed bark beetles in epidemic outbreaks, attacking and damaging ponderosa pine, limber pine, and other hosts.

The ecosystem of bark beetle and host tree is a highly coevolved community of organisms in which the evolution of one member of the community significantly influences the evolution of the other. Largely because of the enormous economic impact these insects exert on the management of our forests, few other such communities have been studied so extensively. Bark Beetles in North American Conifers brings together in one volume both theory and a wealth of empirical data gathered by researchers from all the fields in which bark beetles are studied: ecology, evolutionary biology, population genetics, entomology, and forestry.

Topics covered include the life cycle of bark beetles and their population dynamics, their genetic variation and evolutionary mechanisms, the evolution and systematics of the major groups of bark beetles, pheromone production and its implications for coevolution among these organisms, the interaction between bark beetles and their predators, host resistance and susceptibility, the relationship of parasites and symbiotic micro-organisms in general, and management and control of bark beetles based on sound ecological and evolutionary concepts. The concluding section of the book summarizes the dynamics of the coevolved system of bark beetle and host tree and discusses controversial issues for which this system may provide important answers.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Beyond Optimizing
A Study of Rational Choice
Michael Slote
Harvard University Press, 1989

Philosophy, economics, and decision theory have long been dominated by the idea that rational choice consists of seeking or achieving one’s own greatest good. Beyond Optimizing argues that our ordinary understanding of practical reason is more complex than this, and also that optimizing/maximizing views are inadequately supported by the considerations typically offered in their favor.

Michael Slote challenges the long-dominant conception of individual rationality, which has to a large extent shaped the very way we think about the essential problems and nature of rationality, morality, and the relations between them. He contests the accepted view by appealing to a set of real-life examples, claiming that our intuitive reaction to these examples illustrates a significant and prevalent, if not always dominant, way of thinking. Slote argues that common sense recognizes that one can reach a point where “enough is enough,” be satisfied with what one has, and, hence, rationally decline an optimizing alternative. He suggests that, in the light of common sense, optimizing behavior is often irrational. Thus, Slote is not merely describing an alternative mode of rationality; he is offering a rival theory. And the numerous parallels he points out between this common-sense theory of rationality and common-sense morality are then shown to have important implications for the long-standing disagreement between commonsense morality and utilitarian consequentialism.

Beyond Optimizing is notable for its use of a much richer vocabulary of criticism than optimizing/maximizing models ever call upon. And it further argues that recent empirical investigations of the development of altruism and moral motivation need to be followed up by psychological studies of how moderation, and individual rationality more generally, take shape within developing individuals.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Bhaikṣukī Manuscript of the Candrālaṃkāra
Study, Script Tables, and Facsimile Edition
Dragomir Dimitrov
Harvard University Press

This volume discusses the Bhaikṣukī manuscript of the Candrālaṃkāra (“Ornament of the Moon”), a commentary of the twelfth century based on the Cāndravyākaraṇa, Candragomin’s seminal Buddhist grammar of Sanskrit. The discovery of the Bhaikṣukī script and of all available written sources are described. The detailed study of this codex unicus of the Candrālaṃkāra is accompanied by a facsimile edition and extensive tables of the script, a long-felt desideratum in the field of palaeography. The Buddhist author of the commentary has been identified for the first time, and the nature of his treatise and its position in the Cāndra school of grammar have been expounded. The history of the manuscript and newly discovered traces of the Bhaikṣukī script in Tibet are discussed. This publication will serve as a prolegomenon necessary for the preparation of a critical edition of the Candrālaṃkāra, which until now was believed to have been lost irretrievably.

The Bhaikṣukī Manuscript of the Candrālaṃkāra will appeal to specialists with interests in a variety of fields such as Indian palaeography, grammar, Buddhism, history, and Indo-Tibetan studies.

[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Bibliographical Guide to the Study of the Literature of the USA, 5th ed., revised and enlarged
Clarence Gohdes and Sanford Marovitz
Duke University Press, 1984
The Bibliographical Guide remains the most useful handbook of its kind now available to scholars for research in the field. The fifth revised edition includes updating and considerable but highly selective expansion as well as a section on Women's Studies. This edition includes over 100 new editions as well as more than 750 additional studies and reference works for a total of approximately 1,900 reference items, all annotated with the exception of a few with explanatory subtitles.
[more]

front cover of Black Elected Officials
Black Elected Officials
Study of Black Americans Holding Government Office
James Conyers
Russell Sage Foundation, 1976
Presents the first nationwide profile of black Americans (over 3,500) who now hold elective governmental office. The book is based upon a questionnaire survey of black elected officials together with a comparison survey of white men and women elected to similar types of offices in the same geographical region. The inclusion of extensive quotations from interviews with thirty-four black elected officials adds realism, depth, and insight to the quantitative analysis. The authors interrelate fresh and meaningful information on the political ideologies and motivations of black officials, their perceived political impacts, and expectations for the future. Presents the first nationwide profile of black Americans (over 3,500) who now hold elective governmental office. The book is based upon a questionnaire survey of black elected officials together with a comparison survey of white men and women elected to similar types of offices in the same geographical region. The inclusion of extensive quotations from interviews with thirty-four black elected officials adds realism, depth, and insight to the quantitative analysis. The authors interrelate fresh and meaningful information on the political ideologies and motivations of black officials, their perceived political impacts, and expectations for the future.
[more]

front cover of Black Metropolis
Black Metropolis
A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Ground-breaking when first published in 1945, Black Metropolis remains a landmark study of race and urban life. Few studies since have been able to match its scope and magnitude, offering one of the most comprehensive looks at black life in America. Based on research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers, it is a sweeping historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side from the 1840s through the 1930s. Its findings offer a comprehensive analysis of black migration, settlement, community structure, and black-white race relations in the first half of the twentieth century. It offers a dizzying and dynamic world filled with captivating people and startling revelations.

A new foreword from sociologist Mary Pattillo places the study in modern context, updating the story with the current state of black communities in Chicago and the larger United States and exploring what this means for the future. As the country continues to struggle with race and our treatment of black lives, Black Metropolis continues to be a powerful contribution to the conversation.
[more]

front cover of Black Metropolis
Black Metropolis
A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Ground-breaking when first published in 1945, Black Metropolis remains a landmark study of race and urban life. Based on a mass of research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers in the late 1930s, it is a historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side, the classic urban ghetto. Drake and Cayton's findings not only offer a generalized analysis of black migration, settlement, community structure, and black-white race relations in the early part of the twentieth century, but also tell us what has changed in the last hundred years and what has not. This edition includes the original Introduction by Richard Wright and a new Foreword by William Julius Wilson.

"Black Metropolis is a rare combination of research and synthesis, a book to be deeply pondered. . . . No one who reads it intelligently can ever believe again that our racial dilemma can be solved by pushing buttons, or by gradual processes which may reach four or five hundred years into the future."—Bucklin Moon, The Nation

"This volume makes a great contribution to the building of the future American and the free world."—Louis Wirth, New York Times

"By virtue of its range, its labor and its insight, the book seems certain to become a landmark not only in race studies but in the broader field of social anthropology."—Thomas Sancton, New Republic
[more]

front cover of Black Women Abolitionists
Black Women Abolitionists
Study In Activism, 1828-1860
Shirley J. Yee
University of Tennessee Press, 1992
By virtue of being both black and female in antebellum America, black women abolitionists confronted a particular set of tensions. Whether they supported the movement directly or indirectly, cooperated with whites or primarily with other blacks, worked in groups or independently, were well off financially or struggled to make ends meet, their lives reflected the complex dynamics of race, sex, and class. Against the background of slavery, constructing a life in "freedom" meant adopting many of the values of free white society, symbolized in part by male dominance and female subordination. In championing both their race and their sex, female black abolitionists found themselves caught between the sexism of the antislavery movement and the racism of the (white) women's movement. Throughout their writing, speeches, petitions, and participation in antislavery, and self-help organizations, these women established a pattern of black female activism--centered on community-building, political organizing, and forging a network of friendships with other activists--that served as a model for later generations of black women. Drawing on a wide array of previously untapped primary sources, Shirley Yee examines the activism of black women in the Northeast, the Midwest, and to some extent, California and Canada. The activists' experiences render heartbreakingly clear the pervasiveness of middle-class white values in antebellum America and the contradictions and ironies inherent in prevailing conceptions of "freedom"--Back cover.
 
[more]

front cover of The Blues Detective
The Blues Detective
A Study of African American Detective Fiction
Stephen Soitos
University of Massachusetts Press, 1996
This illuminating book makes the case for a tradition of African American detective fiction--novels written by black Americans about black detectives and incorporating distinctly African American tropes and themes. Beginning with Pauline Hopkins in 1901, black authors consciously altered and subverted the formulas of detective fiction in significant ways. Such writers as J. E. Bruce, Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes, Ishmael Reed, and Clarence Major created a new genre that responded to the social and political concerns of the black community.

Examining the work of these authors, Stephen Soitos frames his analysis in terms of four uniquely African American tropes: altered detective personas, double-consciousness detection, black vernaculars, and hoodoo. He argues that black writers created sleuths who were in fact "blues detectives," engaged not only in solving crimes, but also in exploring the mysteries of black life and culture.

Soitos grounds his study in African American literary theory, particularly the work of Houston Baker, Bernard Bell, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He offers both a new way of conceiving black detective fiction and a series of insightful readings of books in this genre.
[more]

front cover of The Boat People and Achievement in America
The Boat People and Achievement in America
A Study of Family Life, Hard Work, and Cultural Values
Nathan Caplan, John K. Whitmore, and Marcella H. Choy
University of Michigan Press, 1989
During the late 1970s hundreds of thousands of people from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos began their flight out of their homelands. Most left by sea. In emigrating to the United States, these Boat People faced extraordinary cultural, material, and psychological obstacles. In the face of these impediments to success, their rapid economic and educational achievements provide one of the most intriguing success stories of our time. In The Boat People and Achievement in America, Caplan, Whitmore, and Choy report on five years of research on the Indochinese Boat People. Two rounds of surveys conducted in Seattle, Orange County, Chicago, Houston, and Boston provide the empirical basis of this study. The cultural values, family milieu, and psychological characteristics that account for the successes of the Boat People in this country are examined. Extensive quotations from the refugees themselves provide personal insights into their backgrounds and resettlement experiences, and add an important anthropological dimension to the study. Their findings have implications for the whole question of achievement in America.
[more]

front cover of Bondmen and Rebels
Bondmen and Rebels
A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua
David Barry Gaspar
Duke University Press, 1985
Originally published in 1985, and available for the first time in paperback, Bondmen & Rebels provides a pioneering study of slave resistance in the Americas. Using the large-scale Antigua slave conspiracy of 1736 as a window into that society, David Barry Gaspar explores the deeper interactive character of the relation between slave resistance and white control.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Boston Priests, 1848-1910
A Study of Social and Intellectual Change
Donna Merwick
Harvard University Press, 1973

Donna Merwick rejects the usual assumption that Boston Catholicism is, definitively, Irish Catholicism. In her penetrating study of three distinct generations of Boston priests in the late nineteenth century, the author shows that Irish Catholicism met with steady opposition. Her account of the struggle of Boston clerics and intellectuals to relate their faith to their experiences in the changing city provides a new interpretation of Boston Catholic culture.

In the 1840s Catholic influence in Boston was minimal and, therefore, accepted. The clergy, like other Bostonians, took pride in the city's history and colonial traditions. In measuring the impact of the massive Irish-Catholic immigration of the 1850s upon this first group of priests, the author traces in part the desperate efforts of Archbishop John J. Williams to maintain Boston's genteel traditions. The character of the clergy changed from the first generation, in which priests wrote novels and radical editorials, to a second generation, in which the influence of European Catholicism was strengthened. Immigrant priests and their Irish parishioners eventually outnumbered the Yankee Catholics, but they nevertheless failed to win genuine leadership in the diocese.

A third group of priests, emerging in the 1890s under the leadership of Cardinal William O'Connell, displaced not only two generations of clergymen, but also two ways of life: one which sought to leave a legacy of admiration for the Boston Protestant heritage, and one which never understood Boston and tried to replace its cultural ways with something Irish, European, and Jansenistic. O'Connell, who had the Progressive's instinct for organization, imposed a kind of intellectual martial law on the clergy which discouraged, even punished, nonconformity. It is only at this point that it becomes reasonable to consider the traditional view that Boston Catholic thought is monolithic.

[more]

front cover of Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1880
Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1880
A Study in Acculturation, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, With a New Preface by the Author
Oscar Handlin
Harvard University Press, 1991
As fresh today as when it was first published a half-century ago, Boston’s Immigrants illuminates the history of a particular city and an important phase of the American experience. Focusing on the life of people from the perspective of the social historian, the book explores a wide range of subjects: peasant society and the cause of European migration, population growth and industrial development, the ideology of progress and Catholic thought, and urban politics and the dynamic of prejudice. A generation of students and scholars has profited from its insights, and general readers have enjoyed its lively style. A new Preface by the author reflects upon the book’s intellectual origins.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1880
A Study in Acculturation, Revised and Enlarged Edition, With a New Preface by the Author
Oscar Handlin
Harvard University Press, 1979
As fresh in 1991 as when it first published a half-century ago, Boston's Immigrants illuminates the history of a particular city and an important phase of the American experience. Focusing on the life of people from the perspective of the social historian, the book explores a wide range of subjects: peasants society and the cause of European migration, population growth and industrial development, the ideology of progress and Catholic thought, and urban politics and the dynamic of prejudice. A generation of students and scholars has profited from its insights, and general readers have enjoyed its lively style. A new preface by the author reflects upon the book's intellectual origins.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Butcher Workmen
A Study of Unionization
David Brody
Harvard University Press

The advance of trade unionism in the first part of the twentieth century to a dominant place in the American economy brought with it a major change in the life of the nation. This phenomenal growth has not hitherto been adequately studied. This is the first book to deal with the actual process of unionization. David Brody presents here a detailed study of one industry—meat packing and retailing—with implications that apply to unionization in general. Working almost entirely from primary sources, he has had access to the files of both the AFL and CIO unions in the industry.

In this new approach to American labor history, Mr. Brody describes how and when the butcher workmen were organized, how their unions attained internal stability, and how genuine collective bargaining was finally achieved. In attempting to explain why the process developed as it did, he examines union tactics and employer opposition, industry characteristics and the effects of change in the industry. He also pays close attention to the alteration of the power balance brought about by the influence and legislation of the New Deal.

Mr. Brody’s story has two main strands. The more dramatic one concerns the meat-packing branch of the industry. Here the AFL union twice captured the great packing centers and twice lost them in climatic strikes in 1904 and 1921. It was not until World War II, after the advent of the CIO and the New Deal, that organization was finally secure. On the retail side unionization proceeded more quietly with comparatively little progress until the 1930s. The entry of the huge grocery chains such as A & P and Safeway, into the meat field then made this part of the industry accessible to organization.

The study of this particular industry illuminates the larger process of unionization. The meat trade as a whole had the characteristics not only of mass-production industry but also those of small scale, local, skilled labor operations that attracted AFL unions of the old line. Also, the unions of the old line. Also, the unions actually involved provide excellent examples of the rival approaches if the AFL and the CIO to the challenge of unionization. What emerges from the book is the complexity of the phenomenon of unionization. The process covered much more than the recruitment of members, and the causes sprang from a variety of elements, changing in importance at different times and places.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter